A refreshed lineup of MSI gaming laptops has inadvertently revealed that Nvidia is preparing a 12 GB variant of its mobile GeForce RTX 5070. The Crosshair 16 Max HX E2WGXK, listed among several new models MSI announced on 2026-04-15, specifically references an "Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU 12GB GDDR7," a configuration that Nvidia has not officially acknowledged. The current GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU ships with 8 GB of GDDR7, so a 50% bump in frame buffer would be a notable upgrade for memory-hungry workloads and modern games running at high resolutions. For Linux users, Nvidia's Blackwell RTX 50 series GPUs require the open kernel modules rather than the traditional proprietary driver, with version 570 or newer mandatory for Blackwell support. Nvidia publishes these as open-gpu-kernel-modules on GitHub, and the larger 12 GB frame buffer makes the hardware particularly relevant for open-source AI and machine learning inference workloads that exhaust smaller allocations.
MSI's broader announcement covers new entries across its Cyborg, Crosshair, Raider, and Titan product lines, all pairing RTX 50 series GPUs with Intel Arrow Lake and Raptor Lake processors. The 12 GB RTX 5070 model specifically will be offered alongside Intel's Core Ultra 7 251HX, Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, and Core Ultra 9 275HX chips. Existing Crosshair 16 Max configurations with 8 GB RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 options currently sell for around $1,750 (€1,610).
MSI provided no additional specifications for the 12 GB GPU and has not announced pricing or a release date for the E2WGXK variant. The leak suggests Nvidia's own formal announcement could be imminent, as OEM partners typically coordinate product listings closely with GPU launches.
